June/July 2006

Alternative Uses of Radio

  Civil Engagement and Community Radio

radio4all
An excellent site covering the basics of microradio inclusing a great section on how to set up a station (http://www.radio4all.org/how-to.html)

Free Radio Berkeley
"Founded on April 11, 1993 as a Free Speech voice challenging the regulatory structure and power of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Free Radio Berkeley has been engaged in an ongoing legal battle with the FCC..."

National Radio Project
"National Radio Project, producer of Making Contact, is the core focus of International Media Project. National Radio Project heightens public consciousness, broadens debate on critical social issues and encourages civic participation by giving voice to diverse perspectives and opinions underrepresented in the mass media."

How to be a Radio Pirate
An irational.org site full of great basic information.

Polimorphous Space Tetsuo Kogawas site, full of great information including how to make your own FM transmitter from the most basic beginnings. Including the essay "Toward Polymorphous Radio" by Kogawa
"Throughout its history, despite efforts by the Futurists in the 1920s, radio has been considered largely a means of communication rather than an art form. Therefore, it is ironic that just as traditional forms of radio are in decline, its possibilities as an art form are reaching extreme potentials."

Prometheus
A very informative site about community radio.

Freespeech.org
A good section on the basics of low powered transmitting.

  Radio and Art

free103point9
A nonprofit art organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts by promoting artists who explore ideas around transmission as a medium for creative expression.

neuroTransmitter
neuroTransmitter came together in 2001 as a collaborative whose work fuses conceptual practices with transmission, sound production, and mobile broadcast design. Their work re-articulates radio in multiple environments and contexts public, exhibition, over the airwaves considering new forms and possibilities for radio transmission. neuroTransmitter's public performances connect FM radio technology and the body - negotiating, performing, and sonically mapping the invisible and physical spaces of the city. As radio-sonic installation, further work references the politics, history, and technology of the medium.

LIGNA, HH
Ole Frahm, Michael Hüners, Torsten Michaelsen Based on a precise analysis of the interrelationships between the radio broadcasting format and different urban spaces, Ligna develops playful interventions which at all times result from and are situated within the context of social movements. Ligna, a Hamburg-based radio group pursuing a participatory radio format on the free radio station FSK (Freies Sender Kombinat), has been expanding the collective frame of its work since last year to interventions in public and semi-public spaces with the aim of questioning and subverting the dominant bans and exclusion mechanisms in force there. The meanwhile legendary intervention at Hamburg¹s main station in May 2002, ²Ligna¹s Radio Ballet², choreographed the re-introduction of forbidden gestures over the FSK frequency. Dispersed across the entire area of the railway station, several hundred participants followed the instructions transmitted via headphones.